I was walking around Stanley Park, talking with my homegirl about everything. Then she asks me, apropos of nothing, if I’d ever been in a fight. Es is cool, but she’s a private schooler/Ivy Leaguer, and I doubt that she’s ever slugged it out with anybody, so maybe she wanted to live vicariously through her friend who grew up in the barrio.

I’ve thrown chingasos plenty of times, but it was mostly in grade school, when it meant nothing and when nobody could really get hurt.

I did punk two guys, one after the other, when I was a senior in high school. One guy talked smack as I was walking to class, and, in about a second, he was up against the fence, helpless, my left hand depriving him of the sweet oxygen. Once it was clear that I had checked him and that he had learned not to get bad with me, I let him go and turned to his friend, who wanted no taste of what I had given his friend and who walked away as quickly as he could when I stepped to him.

Then there was the time, still in my senior year, when we had had a sub in Mr. Pash’s class. The sub, one of those crappy subs who thinks that you’ll be nicer to him if he lets you do whatever you want, ignored the seating chart and told us that we could sit wherever we wanted. I sat in the row second-closest to the door, three seats back, but I instead went to sit in Frankie’s seat in the back. Why did I take his seat? Because Frankie sat near a bunch of my friends, and Frankie was always picking on them.

I lived in two worlds in high school. I was a wrestler and our team was badass, one of the best in the state, so I was a highly skilled machine who was in great shape and who wasn’t scared of anybody. I was also a brainiac, had been one long before I had ever started wrestling, so I was down with the geeks because I had been rolling geek for most of my life myself. Truthfully, I felt way more affinity for the geeks than for the jocks, so even though Frankie played football (the bitch was only second-string, though), my loyalty was to my fellow nerds.

I was in Frankie’s seat, talking to my fellow brains, when Frankie came in. He walked up to me and said that I was in his seat. I looked up and told him calmly that if he wanted his seat back, he could try to take it from me. He looked at me and I looked at him. All of my nerd buddies had stopped talking and were waiting for whatever was going to happen to happen. Frankie was a little bit bigger than I, and he was standing and I was sitting, but it was pretty clear to him that if he made a move he was going to catch a serious beating in front of the guys that he had been picking on and in front of some of the cool kids. It was pretty clear to me, too. After that day, Frankie didn’t pick on my friends.

But Then Life Gets Difficult: But that’s all small-time high school idiocy; nothing really bad could have happened. I graduated high school in 1987, though, and became a poor-ass junior college commuter. I was always worried about money, and I had gone a bunch of times to the Madera Employment Development Department office to look for any part-time job and to put my name on any list that might get me any type of work.

Finally, I get a call for a two-week gig at the Madera County Fairgrounds. Back in the day, they used to have this thing called the Madera County Chili Cook-Off, and I had been hired as a laborer. The first of the two weeks was spent getting the fairgrounds ready for the two-day cook-off: painting fences and garbage cans, weed whacking, hauling chairs and other stuff on the back of a big flat-bed pickup to wherever it needed to go. During the two days of the cook-off, we were mostly fixing stuff as it got broken and, at the end of the evening’s festivities, dumping the massive amounts of garbage into the two blue industrial-sized dumpsters. The dumpsters were seriously huge; you could probably park three big pickups end-to-end inside one of the dumpsters with no problem, and they were also pretty tall.

Then, after the cook-off was over, we did more fixing, we put everything back where it came from, and went back to dumping garbage. How to say this delicately? People are just disgusting, especially when they’re drunk at a fairground, and they generate a particularly putrid type and  amount of refuse.

The nastiest job after the cook-off had ended had to be taking the garbage bags out of the garbage cans. The garbage reeked, you spent all day fighting off the dry heaves, and there was no telling what would happen when a bag was yanked free of the cans. Would the bag be punctured and leak mystery liquid all over your clothes? Would the bag completely fall apart and leave you standing ankle-deep in putrid garbage that you’d then have to pick up with your hands and shove into another garbage bag?

Luckily, I wasn’t on garbage patrol. Why? Because I had proven to be a hard and trustworthy worker, and I was given the job of driving the flatbed truck from place to place while those on garbage patrol threw the garbage bags onto the truck so that my assistant and I could then take them out to the dumpsters.

It was an easy job, relatively speaking, and I was also the youngest worker, so it shouldn’t have been that big a surprise that at least one person would be unhappy that my job consisted mostly of driving around while he was elbow deep in garbage and trying to keep from vomiting all over himself. That one person was Lou.

Lou was at least twenty-five years old (I was eighteen), he was, minimum, three inches taller than I, and he had at least seventy pounds on me. Why do I mention this? My assistant and I were making another run to have the garbage patrol load more bags on the flatbed, and I had stepped out of the cab for a second. Next thing I know, Lou jumps in the driver’s seat and tells me to jump on the back.

All of a sudden, Lou’s taken my job and punked me in front of everybody. Now, I’m on the back of the truck with my assistant and Lou and his homies are in the cab, having a fabulous time. When we stop to pick up more garbage bags, I was now on garbage patrol, I told Lou that I had been chosen to drive the truck and that I wanted my job back. Lou didn’t care, and he seemed to really be getting a kick out of humiliating me in front of the other guys.

Then I did one of the stupidest things that I have ever done. I challenged Lou to a fight. If I remember correctly, I said something like, “Why don’t we fight then?” I don’t know how/why the hell I did that. Probably, my brain was short-circuiting from the embarrassment that I had suffered and I had no real way to get over that embarrassment, and there was no real way to get my job back because Lou wasn’t going to listen to reason.

After I called him out, Lou took one look at me, smirked, and accepted my challenge. Challenge is probably the wrong word; in his mind, I’m sure that he thought of it more as an invitation to beat my ass. He said that we would slug it out behind the dumpsters after we dumped the next load of garbage. I got back on the flatbed and thought about my soon-to-come beatdown at the hands of Lou.

There’s no way to make this sound better than it is: As we were driving from garbage cans to garbage cans, I started looking for any way out. That he was going to beat the hell out of me if we actually threw down was clear to everybody, to me especially, and Lou seemed like the kind of guy who wouldn’t stop hitting somebody just because the other guy had given up or was no longer capable of fighting back. In other words, I was pretty sure that Lou was looking forward to seriously hurting me.

I had to get out of this, but the only way would have been to say that I didn’t want to go through with the fight. I know what you're thinking, that I just should have said that I didn’t want to go through with the fight. Yeah, that would have been the prudent thing to do, but it would also have been the cowardly thing to do, and I’d then have to permanently carry the weight of having chickened out of a fight when I’d done the calling out myself. If I had already been humiliated, punking out would have been many times more humiliating.

The flatbed is loaded with bags and we’re heading out to the dumpsters. The dumpsters were set up in an “L” shape and were far away from the fairground office, so there was no way for anybody to see what was about to happen. We finish dumping the bags into one of the dumpsters, and now it’s go time. We’re seconds away from the violence, we’re squared up, and I take this moment to say something just truly stupid: “I hope that we can still work together after this.” I was probably hoping to get him to take it easy on me, but it was just probably something to say. I’m not sure.

So, we’re squared up, and I've got my fists out in front of me. This was when I noticed a fundamental flaw in Lou’s fighting stance: he’s got his right hand cocked and it’s way up high. His left isn’t in any kind of defensive position, either; it’s just hanging loosely at his side. Lou’s looking for me to come in so that he can clobber me with his right hand.

This is when my wrestling instincts kick in. I was well coached in high school, thanks to Coach Napier, so I’m trained to look for and then exploit vulnerabilities in my opponent. Not only has Lou committed himself to a very specific offense (and not a very effective one; his right hand is cocked so far back that I’d see a punch coming as soon as he threw it), but he’s not even thinking about defense at all.

His legs are wide open, so, before he can even react, I’m in on a deep double-leg shot. Lou does manage to throw his right hand, but he’s already off-balance and falling backward, so he doesn’t generate much power and can’t be very accurate; the punch misses me completely.

We both go down, he ends up on his hands and knees, and I’m behind him, in great position. This was before I had studied judo for a year, so I didn’t know about the multiple chokes that I could have applied to him at that point. I’m working a cross-face and near ankle, trying to break him down to his stomach, but Lou’s really big and strong, and he manages to get to his feet. I’m still behind him and have my hands locked tightly around his waist. I can’t really get him airborne and go for a suplay (where I drop my hips and then drive myself into a backward arch, taking my my opponent over my body and onto his shoulders and the back of his head), which would have instantly ended the fight. Lou’s throwing elbows at me, but I’m in so close that he can’t make contact. He’s trying to get away but he doesn’t know to attack the hands and get his hips out. Mostly, he’s just dragging me around behind him. He drags me over by the dumpsters, and I decide to go for a back-heel trip (where I place my feet perpendicular to the back of his feet, drop my weight, drive my knees into the back of his knees, and then spin him hard toward his stomach) and smack him into one of the dumpsters.

But he keeps moving around so much that he’s actually running us toward the dumpsters. Instead of trying to slow him down, I decide to try to smack him into the dumpsters as hard as I can. Into the dumpsters we go, but he didn’t hit as hard as I’d hoped that he would. After the light smacking, I did manage to back-heel trip him into the dirt. He managed to break loose and roll over onto his back, but I was on top of him almost instantly.

I still hadn't thrown a punch. This is hard to admit, but, I hadn't ever thrown a punch in a real fight, and, even though he had humiliated me, I didn’t really want to hit Lou, or anybody. This, though, was the time to throw a punch. I’m not going to pretend that this was some big moral crisis, as if throwing a punch would be like crossing over a chasm from humanity to inhumanity, as if throwing a punch with serious intent would be like giving up on one version of myself and settling for a lesser version. Truthfully, my brain was misfiring and I was on autopilot through the whole experience, but I just “knew,” probably in my cells, that I didn’t want to have to hit another person.

Instead, I went for an inside cradle, where I control the head, near arm, and inside leg by locking my hands around all three. I had almost gotten the cradle locked when I heard one of Lou’s seconds yell to Lou, “Break his arm!” but the guy didn’t know that I had Lou completely trapped. Lou couldn’t possibly hurt me, but he was thrashing pretty frantically, trying to free himself. It was then that I realized that he was going to keep coming at me and keep coming at me.

As much as I had controlled Lou and had prevented him from generating any type of serious offense (so far, he’d only gotten off a weak punch and a couple of wild elbows, all of which had missed), I also hadn't hurt him, and he had no reason to stop fighting.

I was going to have to hit him. I threw a punch with my right, short and quick. Since I was right up against him and he had no way to evade the punch, it landed pretty squarely against the side of his mouth. When I punched Lou, it was as if I had hit his off switch. He just completely stopped moving.

I think that Lou knew that I could keep landing that punch until I got tired of throwing it, so further resistance would only buy him more grief. I hung on for a second, just to make sure that this slackness wasn’t some type of ruse and he would try to attack as I stepped away. I let go of him and stood up.

Remember how somebody had suggested to Lou that he try to break my arm? Well, I wanted a piece of whoever had said that because breaking somebody’s arm in a street fight is a little extreme. I turned around to Lou’s seconds and queried, “Who the fuck said to break my arm?” because that guy was in line for an ass-kicking. After I had so thoroughly dominated Lou, though, none of his homies took credit for the aforementioned suggestion.

The Aftermath: Ironically, I didn’t get my job back. In the adrenalin/terror-addled state that I was in, post-brawl, it was a miracle that I was ambulatory or able to form coherent sentences. Next thing that I knew, I was riding on the back of the goddamned flatbed again. But I had gotten my props up, so riding in the back was no longer symbolic.

As soon as the fight was over, I felt badly for Lou. If Lou had really thought about it, there’s no way that he would have fought me. If he beats my then skinny ass, it’s a really big guy beating up a little guy, and he gains no street cred from it. If I win, however, he’s the big guy who lost to the little guy, and in front of his boys, and he’s got to carry that weight.

Why I’m Not Proud: In my mind, there are three parts to the whole Lou vs. Blas Manuel fight. There’s the pre-fight, the exposition, the introduction of the characters and the setting and the basic situation and the complication. There’s the fight, the climax. Finally, there’s the post-fight, the resolution.

Pre-Fight: I’m ashamed of my pre-fight behavior. All of this went down because I had given in to some macho barrio bullshit, because I had been embarrassed in front of other guys, and I had let it affect my judgment. Who were these guys? I didn’t know them and I knew that I wouldn’t see them again when the job was gone. Still, because of some need to not have strangers think that I was a punk, I had gotten into a fight where Lou or I or the both of us could have been seriously hurt.

The Fight: This part I am proud of, but only because I had used good technique to negate Lou’s advantages in height, weight, and strength and to neutralize his offense. Proud though, is the wrong word, or not as exact a word as I would like. Objectively, dispassionately, from a technical perspective, I had done what I had been trained to do: look for and exploit weaknesses in my opponent, fight to my strengths, be relentless.

The Post-Fight: I’d hit a person. I had been so shot through with adrenaline and so far out of my head that I had turned around and had been looking to fight the next guy. The person that I had fought with and had hit never came back to work. He missed the last three days of the job because I had embarrassed him. I don’t know how long Lou had to try to deal with his losing a fight to a skinny kid, or how well he dealt. Luckily, we had all come together for the job and had been strangers before the job began and could go back to being strangers after the job ended. If Lou had lost a fight to me in front of his people, he would have gotten picked on for a long time and he never would have lived it down. As it is, I cost him money and self-esteem.

Why Am I Writing About This?: Why am I thinking of all this, writing about it? I started this post on 27 August 2005, on the day one of my nephews had a birthday party at a roller rink that’s part of the fairgrounds complex. I was going to give my parents a ride home after the party broke up, but I didn’t want my parents to have to ride in a car that wasn’t really clean, so I borrowed a garbage bag from the counterperson at the rink and went outside to clean my car a few minutes before my parents were ready to leave. I was carrying the garbage bag back toward the rink, looking for a garbage can or a dumpster along the way where I could dispose of the bag, when I saw a dumpster off to the left, a little ways back. When I had made it to the dumpster, I could see the spot where Lou and I had thrown down more than seventeen years ago.

The first thing that I felt? Surprise. Surprise that I was close to the spot where I’d thrown my first and last punch. Surprise that I had been talking about this fight only a month before with my homegirl. Surprise that it had been over seventeen years since the fight had taken place and that I’m almost twice as old as I had been then.

Then I felt regret. I could have wrecked my life, or Lou’s. I’m sure he came out of it worse than I did. I mean, I get to feel my little self-reflective, self-involved, writerly regret, I get to process and filter and make sense of it through language, but I didn’t even lose the fight, and here I am, writing six single-spaced pages about an event that was over in probably less than a minute. Lou lost the fight, and he had had to deal with more. Sure, Lou shouldn’t have taken my job and he shouldn’t have been so eager to beat the hell out a little guy he had no business fighting with in the first place. But he was in his mid-twenties, at least, and here he was working a temporary job and he had ended up having to wrestle with leaky garbage bags full of vomit and beer and half-eaten food and he had had to see a teenager driving around with a cushy job for which he had been passed over. But I only understood all of that after the fact, and I didn’t even try to understand or empathize with Lou until after the fight was over. I had thought only of me.

Then I felt wistful. So much time has flown away from me. I’m almost twice as old. How the hell did that happen? I thought of all of the years in between, all the different things that I had done or had not done, all of the different versions of myself that I had been or had not been.

Looking for an Ending: When I started writing this post on Sunday, I didn’t really know where or why it was going, or where or how it would end. I still don’t. I’m a writer, though, and I want things to have endings. But how to close this post? Not with a moral, because there aren’t any. Or if there are, they are the obvious ones. Not with a joke, because this was serious, sad stuff, because that would be unkind to Lou, and I was unkind enough to him back in 1988.

Perhaps with an acknowledgement that we go through all of these things, some great, some horrible, some somewhere in between, and we can never know how long into the future they will or will not echo, or how or when they will suddenly come back, out of nowhere, but that, too, is obvious.